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The goals of this project are to: 1) build, mainly with existing resources, a sequence of scaffolded activities and investigations that will help students more fully understand how the cryosphere changes on multiple time scales and how it impacts and is impacted by the other components of the Earth system; and 2) investigate the effectiveness of the developed sequence of activities and investigations at helping students understand how and why a component of the Earth system varies over time to apply that knowledge to improve the unit of activities used in this study, and to make that knowledge and materials available to the broader educational community. This work will provide a firm foundation on which to develop a full high school capstone Earth system science course that will include the broader range of complexity and time scales present in the Earth system—a course which is now on the books in Texas—and make these materials available to high school teachers and students across the country through theEarthLabs web site. The project will also create a teacher professional development program to help high school teachers use these materials.

The National Science Foundation has made this project possible through grant number GEO-0807575.